help getting Triple boot down to dual boot

[jba6511]

Ok guys here is the situation. Right now I am triple booting between XP Pro, Vista and Ubuntu. XP is my primary (C:\) and ubuntu, vista and a data partition all exist. I had a problem tonight with a corrupt conf file in XP. Because of this, I have lost Grub and can not get into Ubuntu. I can access Vista still and all the files stored in my C drive, data partition and Vista. I want to get rid of XP Pro, and have Vista and Ubuntu in a dual boot configuration, with my data partition as well to be accessed by both (will mount in ubuntu). Partitions should look like
Vista (C) 40GB
Ubuntu (U) 40 GB
Swap File 2GB
Data (F) The rest of the hard drive (using a 320 GB Seagate)

Right now they look like this:
C: XP 20GB
Data 190 something GB (I think)
Swap 2GB
Ubuntu 60 something GB
Vista 20GB

So my questions are:
1. How do I restore Grub? I know there are plenty of posts but its late and I will search tomorrow - can u just point me in the right direction or give me a how to.
2. How do I get rid of XP and move vista from the partition it is on to the main partition? I am ok with formatting vista as I do not have much installed or configured yet.
3. Is it possible to leave ubuntu alone while doing all of this? Right now it is 60GB in size but I plan to use the live cd to resize Ubuntu and allocate the free space (Hopefully, not sure how to allocate to the data partition)
4. How would you recommend setting up Ubuntu if it needs to be reinstalled during this process?

Sorry for all of the questions.

 

[frenchsquared]

vista has a drive managment feature that will alow you to reformat the partition that xp is on. You can then expand the partitions that vista and lynx are on. once sizing is done you can rename the partition vista is on to c. I did similar thing the other night. Its a rather nice feature.

cant remember exactly. control panel/administative tools/ look around it an icon with 2 grey gears

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

Good work, Grasshopper, but I have a more challenging problem:

During my Vista Beta testing days, I was running XP Pro SP2 and Vista on the same HDD. I split the drive into three partitions (XP, Vista, space). As I realized how horribly Vista sucked, I deleted the partition which contained Vista. However, when booting, I still get the "Choose which OS you want", screen. And basically ever since, the system has been acting a little screwy (long boot times and/or not wanting to shut down).

What say you, good sir?

 

[Zoron]

You may have wiped out Vista, but you didn't wipe out it's boot loader. You're going to have to do a repair with your Windows XP CD to get XP's bootloader back in place.

To the original poster: you should be able to use your Ubuntu disc to restore Grub. However, moving Vista to another partition may prove to be a bit trickier... you'd have to have some sort of program that could clone your Vista partition to the other partition... and then it would be a simple matter of deleting / reformatting the partiton Vista was on before.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

Ahh, now that brings me to another question I have had: How in the hell does one use the XP recovery console? I run it, type in the admin password, it loads something, then exits to a prompt.

Any links to how that thing works would be appreciated; I haven't really been able to find good answers about this.

 

[Zoron]

Don't use the recovery console... it's a command-line tool. Instead, select Install Now, do the press F8 accept thing, and then on the next screen, you should be provided with an option to press 'R' for repair. This is where you want to perform the repair action.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

Thanks for that info...I actually hadn't thought of that. Am I correct to assume that this procedure shouldn't result in a loss of data? Sort of like the Office Detect and Repair option?

And for future reference, how does one go about removing a second OS? I've seen countless articles on how to have multiple OSs on a single system, but never saw one on how to remove another.

Thanks again for you help! I will try it out later today!

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

I tried using the option of having XP repair itself: A complete and utter failure! I think that the problem is more than what a repair can fix and it looks like a complete reinstall of the OS is going to be in order.

That's OK though. She's into the Sims games and is always downloading GBs (Yes, that's GIGABYTES!) of add-ons for it. I think that some if not most are causing some of these issues. I can think of a few more but I won't go into it here.

And to make sure she doesn't fuck things up in the future, her account will not have install rights. She won't like that. Too bad for her.